Teaching Bananas is like Teaching Home Care

The original Chiquita bananas commercial actually teaches the viewer about bananas. When are they ripe? Who needs them? What not to do with them (put in refrigerator). How to use them. Take a look and see if you can answer how teaching bananas is like teaching home care.

If you said the viewer needs to know what home care is, who needs it, and how it can be used, you are correct. Add that also who pays is a question that needs answering, how much does it cost, and how does one select a provider.

Like bananas used to be before they were readily available everywhere, home care is something that people do not know about until they have a need for it. Then they simply cannot get enough information about it.

Most people do not know that Medicare does not pay for home care. Or that Medicare only pays for a small portion of home care, and that portion is VERY highly regulated and tied to specific conditions for which there is a progressive recovery. Home care needs that most people have when they need assistance with activities to help them live daily, are not covered by Medicare and probably never will be.

However, unlike bananas, home care is a hard subject to teach, because it differs based on disease or frailty, support systems available to the recipient of care, financial abilities and geography. corecubed has a great program we offer for agencies that educates around the questions that someone needing home care might ask. Perhaps we need a cute jingle and a dancing walker to go along with the teaching…..